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Are you being served?

Ok, so along with my R2, a side project is something that will hopefully fit inside of R2 and make him even more popular. To reprise his role in Return of the Jedi he will be serving drinks, and not just glasses from a fancy tray bolted to his shoulders. He will be able to mix a drink for you and dispense it into your glass.

The idea is, to have a bunch of reservoirs in a caddy inside R2’s main body, with pipes to an automatic arm that will open a door and raise, allowing you to put your drink under it. My design so far allows for five bottles, with peristaltic pumps from adafruit (via a UK reseller, Phenoptix), some L293D motor drivers, a TLC5940 PWM driver, and an Arduino Pro mini. I still have a long way to go on the design, but I have managed to the main module constructed and the pumps installed. I’ve also got a first revision of the circuit schematic worked out, along with a PCB layout that I’ve ordered from OSHPark.

A closeup of the pumps

The main unit is made from a series of laser cut acrylic sheets, with a central threaded rod as the main shaft. The bottle tops still need holes for the tubing to go into, and the lids will be glued to the acrylic. Refilling will be done by removing the bottom plate and unscrewing the bottles. I also need to figure out ideas to check for the fluid level so I get notified when a bottle is nearly empty.

The main control for selecting the drinks will be handled by a Raspberry Pi, talking over i2c to the arduino to control the motors. This will allow me to do an embedded web server for selecting the drinks, depending on what options are available. R2 will also have most of his communication done over i2c which will allow the drinks dispenser tie into that and control the door and dispensing arm. Other future ideas are also having a few spare bottles and QR codes as labels on them so that I can automatically scan them in so that the Pi knows what drinks are available rather than having to key the data in manually.

The main unit.

This is my first attempt at doing an actual useful PCB. Probably many errors and will need another couple of revisions, but it is a start. The Schematics and other files can be found on github here: